In this video, I'm going to talk about
the importance of your locus of control.
What is it?
How do you know where you lie
on the spectrum of internal to external?
And how do you become more internally focused?
I'm Dr. Tracey Marks,
a psychiatrist and I make mental health education videos.
Locus of control refers
to the degree to which you feel
the things that happened to you are within your control
versus being controlled by external circumstances.
Another way of putting
it is, it's a measure of how much you feel
a sense of agency over your life.
How much of what happens to you is because of your efforts
and how much is because of luck, fate or circumstances.
And this is how it can look,
people with the strong internal locus of controlled
also called internals are optimistic,
expect that there will be ups and downs in life,
are open to exploring options and solutions,
take responsibility for the things
that they have or don't have
and recover more quickly from setbacks.
People with a strong external locus of controlled,
also called externals,
not to be confused with eternals,
are pessimistic about most things,
blame other people or things when something goes wrong,
or when they feel set back, often feel victimized,
anxiously think about what-if scenarios
and have trouble recovering from setbacks.
Where your focus lies is on a continuum.
Some people are strongly internally focused
believing circumstances don't matter
and anyone can do anything
if they just work hard enough.
People who are strongly external
respond very passively to the world
and think that nothing they do matters,
and that they're victims of the whims of the world.
And then they're the people who lie
somewhere in between these two extremes.
Your temperament, personality and childhood experiences
affect your locus.
For example, traumatic experiences in childhood
can leave you feeling helpless
or subject to the whims of other people.
You can also learn to rely on fate
and things outside of yourself by modeling your caregivers.
It's hard for a child to stand alone and say,
"I've got this."
When you don't have the emotional support
of the people around you, who themselves
may be fretting and saying, "You just never know."
Now the reality is nothing is determined by one thing,
every outcome isn't determined
solely by your efforts or solely by external factors.
It's a combination of factors,
but the idea is that what you believe about your part
in your life outcome affects how empowered you feel
and how much effort you put forth
to achieve a certain result.
That's the bottom line here.
So here's an example.
Let's say I'm prepping to take the SAT
or some other certification exam,
with an internal locus
I believe I can do well on this test
as long as I study hard enough.
I may not do as well as I'd like,
but I'll try as hard as I can.
With an external focus,
I may think that no one can do well on this test
because it's a setup to weed people out.
Only lucky people score well
or people who pay to get their test scores altered.
So why bother studying for it at all?
I might as well just see what happens.
Even though studying doesn't guarantee a good score,
rhe likelihood is that I will do better
if I get behind the prep
and put some time into it as opposed to doing nothing.
If I do nothing and then do poorly
as an external locus person,
I don't conclude that I did bad because I didn't study.
My poor score just reinforces my belief
that things just don't work out for me.
So it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Your locus affects your behavior
which affects your outcomes,
and those outcomes reinforce your locus.
So how do you change the prophecy
of being a victim of bad luck or bad circumstances?
You change your mindset and behavior
to get a trickle down effect of changing outcomes.
These different outcomes positively reinforce the idea
that your active efforts matter.
Here are four ways to make
your external focus more internal.
Number one, deconstruct the blame process.
Recognize when you blame someone
or other circumstances for something.
Think about what your role was in the situation
and then think about one thing
that you could have done differently
that may have changed the outcome.
It could be as basic
as I could have left the house 15 minutes earlier
or I could have started on the project a day earlier,
then file that away as an option to use
the next time in a similar situation.
Number two, plan to take risks,
even if they're small risks.
Since people have different risk thresholds,
how you do this is very personal.
Think about a situation that makes you uncomfortable.
The risk you take could be volunteering for something
or speaking up in a group,
asking someone for a favor
or being the first to show up for something.
These are all things that take some degree
of assertiveness to do.
And if you fail or get a no,
there's an emotional price to pay,
a feeling disappointed or insulted
but the more you take these risks,
the better you get at the risks.
And then when you do get a positive result,
it reinforces the concept that you do have some control
over whether you get what you want or not.
Number three, welcome failure.
Piggybacking on taking risk
is becoming comfortable with disappointments
and seeing them as a stage or an experience,
that's one of many in your life.
This ties in with a growth mindset
over a fixed mindset.
With a growth mindset, you see yourself
as being able to adapt to circumstances
in a way that advances you to a higher place.
So a disappointment is a temporary step backwards
or a pause in your progress
but it's not a permanent state.
With a fixed mindset,
you believe that you're stuck with the resources
that you have and there's no room for improvement.
So a disappointment inflicts permanent damage.
Number four, focus on the things that you can control.
It's easy to feel overwhelmed
when you spend too much time thinking about
all of the factors that are not impacted by your efforts.
You can't control acts of nature, the economy
or to bring it even closer to home.
You can't control other people.
So when you have a situation that involves others
like a relationship problem,
even as you recognize what the other person is doing wrong,
know that you can't control them.
You can only control how you respond to their behavior.
If their behavior damages you,
focus on how you can limit your contact with them
or limit how vulnerable you allow yourself
to be with a person.
And these are just examples to illustrate
how in a situation that involves
a lot of factors beyond your control,
you can focus on the things that you are able to control.
Take a look at this video on how to manage worry.
I'll talk about how to separate real world problems
from hypothetical worries.
Thanks for watching.
See you next time.